The UCSC Pre-Doctoral Bioinformatics Training Program will educate students from science, computing, and statistical backgrounds and meld them into innovative, multidisciplinary bioinformatics researchers. The program builds upon UCSC's strengths in MCD Biology, biochemistry, computing, statistics, and of course our renowned bioinformatics research program. Students will have a rigorous corpus of required graduate course work across the disciplines and take part in a 3-4 quarter rotation designed to expose them to experimental labs and computing labs, genome and protein analysis, and the standards of research in science and engineering. This background will enable them to lead bioinformatics efforts to understand biology and disease, advancing the frontiers of biological and biomedical research. Our program also requires all students to complete a bioethics course and a training course in research and teaching methods, as well as regular research seminars. [unreadable] [unreadable] UCSC has been particularly successful in its bioinformatics efforts in research and in postdoctoral training, as well as in training students from a variety of disciplines. Our graduates are at top university faculty positions and leading industrial research laboratories. This grant and our new undergraduate and doctoral programs in bioinformatics will enable us to extend our research experience to a greater number of students in an effort to fill this area of national need. We will additionally focus on underrepresented student recruitment, the largest efforts of which will take place at the undergraduate level in a variety of targeted summer research programs geared to increasing our pool of qualified graduate applicants and diversifying the bioinformatics workforce. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]